Books address any space, any style

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, March 17, 2001

Whatever your taste -- traditional or contemporary -- or your space -- bungalow, mansion, even a loft -- there's a new design book written with you in mind.

Some books dwell on decorating guidelines, such as selecting colors and fabrics, while others take a loftier, more aesthetic approach. For instance, prolific design author Dr. Carol Soucek King explores her belief that "good design is much more than skin deep."

An individual's home -- whether Zenlike in its simplicity or overflowing with bold ethnic treasures -- connects everyday life to the spiritual, King says. While her latest book, Designing With Spirituality: The Creative Touch (PBC, $37.50), does not offer decorating advice per se, it opens doors to a variety of inspiring, personal homes ripe with design ideas to study and perhaps borrow.

On the other hand, The Art of Interior Design: Selecting Elements for Distinctive Styles (Creative Publishing International, $39.95) focuses on the basics. Author Suzanne Woloszynska dissects a wide range of appealing decorating schemes, as well as reasons for the designers' selections. Each chapter studies a different style -- more than 30 in all -- or color scheme.

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Not the usual resource list with names of designers and shops, Woloszynska's back-of-the-book directory gives helpful information on fabrics, paints, wallpapers and flooring in the interiors photographs -- details you wish were always included in design books.

Here's a list of others that will keep you browsing for hours.

· Nina Campbell's Decorating Secrets: Easy Ways to Achieve the Professional Look (Clarkson Potter, $40) offers a step-by-step strategy for achieving the look you envision for every room. The British designer known internationally for books and her fabric, carpet, paint and wallpaper collections -- as well as her interior design work -- says she had great fun exploring her own decorating knowledge to put into a cohesive format for readers. The results are highly readable, informative and inspiring, accompanied by photographs of interiors rich with impeccable taste and layers of details.

· Just the opposite of Campbell's traditional approach to design is the inventive, modern style presented in The Imaginative Book of Home Decoration by Metamorphosis (Atrium, $24.95). The award-winning team of European architects and designers who make up the Barcelona-based group Metamorphosis eschew trend cycles, preferring to find individual design solutions for each situation. The exciting way the designers manipulate space and light throws down a challenge to rethink our interiors.

· Once you've lived with rich, vivid color on the walls, you'll wonder why you insisted on those pale neutral tones for so long. If you're hesitant to take the plunge, Mood Indigo: Decorating With Rich, Dark Colors by Vinny Lee (Watson Guptill, $35) provides the needed push. Logical text and handsome photographs demonstrate how strong colors can create cozy or dramatic interiors, even -- contrary to popular theory -- make a small space seem infinite. This book may send you straight to the paint store.

· Yet another completely different design mind-set is embraced in Naturally Modern: Creating Interiors With Wood, Stone, Leather and Natural Fabrics by Ros Byam Shaw (Abrams, $27.50). There's a compelling peacefulness about the mainly natural tones, the play of textures, the simplicity of designs and the absence of excess in the featured interiors. Shaw says, "Life is complicated, plastic, computerized. But ... we seem to be finding a middle ground much in the Arts and Crafts tradition where natural materials speak for themselves, and comfort and fashion coexist. ... "

· In Room Recipes: Ingredients for Great Looking Rooms (Rockport, $35), designers Cheryl and Jeffrey Katz discuss 13 distinct decorating styles and how to create your own interpretations of each. Styles range from White White and Cottage Life to Elegant Eclecticism and Inside Out. In each room, after presenting the concept, the Katzes number and explain the ingredients that make up the whole. Their hope, they write, is "to demystify decoration and make it accessible."

· Designers in Residence: The Personal Style of Top Women Decorators and Designers by the editors of Victoria Magazine (Hearst Books, $30) not only takes you inside the homes of 18 designing women, it also explains their decorating philosophies and guidelines. One decorating principle seems to unite them: Think of home furnishings as clothing. Just as they change the fashions they wear, these women change rooms more often than most and accessorize with a deft hand.

Two Texans are included in Designers in Residence: Carol Bolton, whose vintage style has led to Homestead and other popular shops in Fredericksburg and a line of furniture for E.J. Victor, and Ann Fox, owner of the Dallas store Room Service.

· The handsome Houston home of Aurora and Camilo Barcenas, filled with the colors and art of their native Nicaragua, brightens the pages of Real Life Decorating: Your Life, Your Style, Your Home (Meredith Books, $29.95). Editor Linda Hallam uses 10 individual homes to show how passions and personalities are more important than stodgy decorating rules when creating personal style. Featured homes run the gamut from the Barcenases' "empty nest" that's always welcoming family and friends to single designer Jeffrey Alan Marks' pared-down, '50s ranch-style home in La Jolla, Calif.

· Loft living, an urban lifestyle gaining momentum in Houston, is celebrated in two new books: Loft Style by Dominic Bradbury (Watson Guptill, $24.95) and Recycled Spaces, Converting Buildings Into Homes by Vinny Lee (Soma, $35). Both explore innovative residences adventurous urban dwellers have created in former warehouses, factories, schools, even churches. Anyone curious about living in a loft will appreciate these books.